I had a plan to go to Dreamforce 2018. But I didn’t. It was too much for my agenda and workload. But, thanks for real time streaming and social networking, you can make it “almost live”. Of course, you won’t shake hands of people live and won’t attend Metallica Dreamforce concert.
My favorite topic at Dreamforce this year is Customer 360. Here is a passage from CRN article – Salesforce’s Benioff Paints Exuberant Vision of ‘Inclusive Capitalism’
Harris introduced Customer 360—not a product, he said, but a new capability that’s included at no charge as part of the Salesforce customer success platform. Customer 360 offers each Salesforce-based enterprise a point-and-click interface connecting data across all the Salesforce clouds—Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce.
The feature can be used to build comprehensive customer profiles, with unique identifiers and attributes, and pre-built packages for creating cross-channel experiences, Harris said. And customer 360 includes integration capabilities, connecting Salesforce’s portfolio to other technologies in the enterprise, such as human resources and ERP systems.
Check Salesforce.com blog –what is Customer 360 article.
Here is a passage:
For customers of Salesforce B2B products, all information is in one place, in a single data model for marketing, sales, B2B commerce and service. This makes it easy for a marketer to see how their campaigns turn into leads, opportunities, pipeline, and sales. A sales rep can see support cases before they go into a meeting. Support reps can see open sales opportunities. Customer account hierarchies and contact relationships enable even deeper visibility.
Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Pardot, B2B Commerce, CPQ, Community Cloud, Health Cloud, Financial Services and Lightning Platform all use the same data model, called Standard and Custom Objects. Not only do they work together, the data is also available in Einstein Analytics and the Salesforce Mobile app.
Customer 360 is a big data “vacuum cleaner” Salesforce is building to provide an unified analytical point of view on customer operation. Data is transformed and aligned among multiple disciplines and data silos. Salesforce seems to be using the power of MuleSoft acquisition to get data from multiple silos.
I found manufacturing data island is terrible missing in the conversation about customer 360 and the opportunity to collect data objects in single cohesive data sets. I wonder what strategy and technologies Salesforce will be using to bring relevant information about product, bill of materials, service and maintenance data.
What is my conclusion? Businesses are looking for data to make business with companies. The time when manufacturing companies were selling physical products might be over. Manufacturing companies are selling services (virtual records) about physical objects used by their customers. Assets such as airplanes, turbines, industrial equipment is connected to produce data that is going to be connected into information objects used in new digital services. Sounds too complex? Welcome into modern digital world. Do you think manufacturing companies and their software providers are ready? I doubt… We just at the beginning of digital revolution in manufacturing . Just my thoughts…
Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased
